After the Warlords

Jon Lee Anderson talks with Amy Davidson about President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, of Liberia, her country’s civil war, and his time as a boy there.

This week in the magazine, Jon Lee Anderson writes about President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, of Liberia, the first democratically elected female head of state in Africa. Here, with Amy Davidson, Anderson discusses Johnson Sirleaf, her country’s civil war, and his time as a boy there.

AMY DAVIDSON: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has just been inaugurated, with great pomp, as the leader of a devastated country. What are the challenges she faces?

JON LEE ANDERSON: Extraordinary challenges, on a par, perhaps, with the kinds of challenges that one associates with countries like Afghanistan. Liberia was ruined by the dictatorship and the civil war it’s experienced in the past twenty-five years—more than half the population has been displaced or forced to seek refuge in neighboring countries; more than two hundred thousand people were killed in the war; and as many as a hundred thousand young men who fought in the war are now roaming around the country or unemployed in the capital city, Monrovia. And Monrovia is a place of slums and ruins, with no running water or, for that matter, power. Virtually everything in the country is being administered by the United Nations, which is keeping the peace with fifteen thousand troops from about eighteen different countries, and an alphabet soup of agencies. The country was raped by the warlord turned president Charles Taylor, who is in exile in Nigeria, and who, like other warlords in Liberia, used children as soldiers. And the two and a half years of transitional government prior to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s inauguration was, by all accounts, and from what I’ve seen, a case study in rampant corruption, to the extent that the national assembly was literally stripped of everything, right down to the carpeting and the wall outlets, by the outgoing parliamentarians. The wonderful inaugural moment of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, attended by Laura Bush and Condoleezza Rice, had to be held outside, in the garden of the parliament, because the inside was in no condition to hold it.

How prepared is Johnson Sirleaf to deal with all of that? Is she the right person for this moment?

I think she is. About the best that you can hope for in a place like Liberia, and I don’t mean that in any sort of condescending way. She’s an extremely bright and sophisticated woman. She’s a woman who has spent a good part of her adult life abroad. She’s worked with the U.N. and with the World Bank and other financial institutions. She’s lived in Washington and New York, Nairobi and Abidjan. She’s also a woman of Liberian soil. She knows her country. She’s been a political player for all of these tumultuous years, but she does not have her hands bloodied—although she didn’t get where she is without a little political baggage. She’s quite honest about that, about mistakes she’s made along the way, in the past, and, in fact, what she told me was that she felt she was the right person because she represents everything that the rest of Liberia does—both the good and the bad. She acknowledged that. There are no rose-tinted glasses there. She is certainly politically ambitious, which can help a leader, but she has a long-standing reputation, even among her detractors, for fiscal probity. She’s not regarded as having been personally corrupt. There are still some question marks concerning the people she’s put into her government, many of whom represent the old order, and she’s had to cut deals with faction leaders who remain at large. Many former warlords are now senators in the national legislature, people who, in some cases, committed the most atrocious crimes.

You mentioned Liberia’s contradictions. Talk a little about Liberia’s unique history in Africa, and America’s unique role in Liberia.

Liberia was described, in an earlier and gentler time, as Uncle Sam’s stepchild, but I think it’s probably more appropriate to call it a bastard state of the United States. Liberia is to America what Sierra Leone is to the United Kingdom—that is, both countries were founded by freed slaves in the early nineteenth century. Liberia was the first republic in Africa, the only African state other than Ethiopia to have never been colonized by the European powers. It was settled by slaves who were returned to Africa through the offices of the American Colonization Society, and whose descendants are called Americo-Liberians. In many cases, they had nothing in common with the Liberian tribes of the interior, and there were very brutal wars. Eventually, they carved out a state that, in the last century and a half, has been largely characterized by venality and a kind of unique antebellum oligarchy, in which the Americo-Liberians left the tribes of the interior—mostly animists, ruled by sorcery or juju, as it’s called there—largely to themselves. That changed in 1980, when Samuel Doe, a master sergeant in the Liberian Army and a member of the Krahn tribal group, bayonetted the then President to death in his bed and assumed power.

What about being a woman in Liberia? It’s often noted that Johnson Sirleaf is the first woman to be elected head of state in a modern African country. How has that been for her in Liberian politics?

There’s a long tradition of the strong woman in African society, just as there are the so-called “big men” of African politics. There’s a kind of defined role, very often a maternal one, which is filled with cultural references going back to tribal beliefs and which officially gives women a certain status within the society. Of course, this has often been violated, as it has been for women everywhere. But I think there’s a tradition in Liberia in particular, in which men by and large have ruled the destinies of Liberians and destroyed their country for so many years that, at this point, the fault lines, the gender lines, cease to matter.

It’s time to try something else.

It’s time to try something else, from someone who, very importantly for Liberians, is a person who was always renowned for her honesty. That matters, especially following the years of brutish rule by Charles Taylor—who was the closest thing to a murderous buccaneer that modern Africa has probably known—when he openly ransacked the country.

Charles Taylor casts a big shadow over Johnson Sirleaf’s Presidency. What role does he play now?

Charles Taylor was more or less forced to leave office in 2003, in order to put an end to the civil war. The international community finally sort of ganged up and insisted that he leave. He agreed as long as he had safe sanctuary in Nigeria, which he was granted, and he lives there today, in what I hear is great comfort, in a walled compound in a Nigerian beach town. He is believed to have become fabulously wealthy in his years as a warlord and then President, and retains access to that wealth despite his exile in Nigeria. And he continues to wield influence through his wealth and his ability to call up, if he should desire, men to fight on his behalf. We’re talking about a country with eighty-five-per-cent unemployment; a hundred dollars can go a long way toward persuading a guy who spent years in the bush killing people to do the same again. Taylor faces war-crimes charges in Sierra Leone, for his role in that country’s war, and right now Johnson Sirleaf is dealing with the question of whether he can be extradited from Nigeria, and, if so, to which country.

That also raises questions about accountability. How do Liberians feel about a war-crimes court, about bringing people who committed atrocities to justice? Would they prefer to simply put those years behind them?

It depends on who you are. A great many people were victimized by the war, and the needs are so basic that I think the first thing on most Liberians’ minds is where the next meal is going to come from, or how they’re going to get a roof on their house. Will they have a house, rather than a shack in a ruin? Will they be able to return to their home villages, which were burned and ransacked, so they can plant again? The country has some of the worst social indicators in the world. Now, walking around amid all of these victims and innocents in Liberia are people with blood on their hands, and some of them are very wealthy, and they’ve managed to use the new political system to legitimatize themselves, taking their war-gotten gains and somehow laundering them through the new democracy, through their political positions, and, in a sense, now waging their war politically and economically—but with the implicit threat that they could always use violence again. These are great difficulties.

One senator you spoke to was Prince Johnson, a former warlord who is notorious for having tortured former President Samuel Doe to death. He had his men cut off Doe’s ears and made him eat one of them. I was struck by how open and unrepentant he was when you asked him about that. It doesn’t happen often that you talk to someone who’s done that to another person. One might hesitate to ask him about it. As a journalist, do you find that it works best to be direct with someone like that?

I felt my way with Prince Johnson, and I felt that I had no choice but to ask him directly, which is what I did. He became very angry, which I think comes through in the article. And I became, suddenly, the representative of all his critics and the outside world. He went into a monologue about it. He said, “Why do you ask me only about Doe? What about the murders and the massacres he committed?” Then he reeled off a long litany of those massacres, which have been almost expunged from our memories because of all the depredations that followed. It’s true: Doe brought the bush to the city, and he eviscerated the sitting President with a bayonet. He then had most of the cabinet machine-gunned on a beach in public. He murdered hundreds of refugees in a church and in hospitals. He turned the Liberian Army into a tribal faction loyal only to him. And, suddenly, I began to see Prince Johnson—like you, I had heard about what he’d done; it’s one of those hallmark incidents—for what he was, a man without a great education, from the bush. He’d risen through the ranks of the Army, then fled after one of those massacres, following a coup, and eventually came back, and when he finally found himself in control of this man—he was also much younger then—he tortured him to death, trying to find out where his supposed bank accounts abroad were and things like that. As strange as it sounds, for a moment I found myself sitting in Prince Johnson’s shoes, and I thought, Perhaps it’s not so difficult to torture somebody to death if you feel so much anger and pain over what that person has done to your people. It put it into perspective for me. What Johnson was trying to say was: Who’s going to cast the first stone? He knows he has a problem with having tortured Doe to death. He’s become a deacon of the Protestant Church and claims to have found God, and I suppose in his mind he has. He’s asked for forgiveness. And it’s not something he can avoid or deny, but he appealed to me to try to see it within the context of everything else that had happened within the country, and, you know, plenty did happen. That’s the horror of what’s happened to Liberia—that a man can be a senator who tortured a President to death, and his crime can pale in comparison with those of the man who became President afterward.

What you are describing—how common, how ordinary the atrocities and horrors in Liberia are—how do Liberians deal with that on a day-to-day level? How do they get along with each other after that, as neighbors or co-workers or people sitting next to each other on the bus? Do they talk about it, or is there a silence?

Most people wear it under the surface, like they do in other countries where these holocausts have occurred—in Cambodia and so many other places that we could mention. But it’s there. Most people have been brutalized and traumatized to the extent that they have nothing left, so their struggle is about daily existence. That’s something very difficult for us affluent Westerners to comprehend. Liberians have always been very religious, both tribally—animist, that is—and as Christians, which are the majority. They cling to their faith. There’s been a flowering of churches in the country. There were always a lot of them, but now they’re everywhere. And this is a great solace to many—for instance, Christian ideas of redemption and reconciliation. Religion and spirituality are very important in Liberia today, I would say even more so than politics. But there’s this silence. There’s a real problem in Liberia today of rape, a very big problem. And also of mob violence. People are beaten or burned to death if they’re caught thieving. I was going to the market one day and I saw a young man being chased by a mob, and he was lucky that a policeman happened to be nearby and saved him. What struck me was that the adolescents who were following the thief, who was not much older than they were, were laughing and singing as they chased him. It was like a sport. But there was obviously a great hatred under the surface, a need to exorcise all those unreconciled demons on something physical. So these are the kinds of terrible things that are haunting the landscape, which is what Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is really going to have to tackle if she’s ever going to make Liberia healthy again.

Now, you have a history in Liberia, too. You lived there for a year when you were a boy. How did you end up there?

To make a long story short, I had been raised abroad, and my family had returned to the United States briefly for a year when I was twelve. I had not enjoyed it very much, and I dreamed about being an explorer and leading an adventurous life, and I kept running away. The solution was to send me for a year to live with my uncle Warren Coonrad, who lived in Liberia and was a geologist there, in 1970. So I went there and spent a year with him when I was thirteen, and I have to say I was very happy. For me, it was a wonderful country. I would go up into the bush with my uncle’s cook, into his tribal village. I danced for the first time with the people of his tribe. I learned quite a bit of the dialect. They gave me a tribal name. For me, it was just a wonderful time. It was clearly a country with problems lurking under the surface which, as a boy, I wasn’t that cognizant of. The thing about Liberia that has been lost to the outside world, which associates it with mass murder and tribal frenzy, is that Liberians, quite apart from anything else, are irrepressibly joyful people. They have a great sense of humor—even in their misery today. Sometimes, now, there’s a slightly more cynical edge to the humor: I saw a little shop there with the name Neutral Ground and a calling center named Who Knows Tomorrow?

I remember, though, you didn’t quite stay put in Liberia, either. You travelled a lot through Africa.

I did. Apart from going into the bush as often as I could, I crossed over into Sierra Leone and into Guinea, where I was actually arrested and accused of being a spy. I was thirteen. I was constantly getting into trouble, but nothing terrible happened to me. I also travelled to East Africa, where my father and my uncle knew people in the various capitals. The idea was that I was going to have an East African adventure, take a month off from school and do reports for my various teachers in order to justify this, and people would somehow look after me while I was in Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia. What I actually did was check in with them and then take off on my own. I looked a bit older than my years, and so a lot of these people didn’t quite know what to do with me, and they let me go. Then, to the Africans, when I was travelling on my own, I would lie—I would tell them I was a twenty-eight-year-old Peace Corps volunteer, and I would find that most Africans couldn’t really tell my age. If they were incredulous, they didn’t say so. So I was able to do a lot of things. I camped out alone in the Serengeti, and I travelled out to the Ogaden desert in Ethiopia. I went elephant-hunting with a Canadian gospel minister in western Uganda the week after Idi Amin seized power. I had a ball and I didn’t want to come back. I ended up staying two months and getting into all sorts of trouble with my family, because, basically, I didn’t write, didn’t call.

Does that sort of thing seem remotely possible for a young person today, do you think?

No! And I haven’t told my children how old I was when I did these things, and they don’t really know about it, because it sets up a bit of a challenge, and Africa has changed. Of course, it was changing while I was there, and I was only vaguely cognizant of it. I think I was young enough—when you’re that young you don’t feel fear, and for me it was all a great adventure. I loved Africa and the Africans, and I wanted to know it all; I wanted to go everywhere and I wanted to do everything I could do. And I did as much as I could until I was sort of handcuffed and dragged home. But it was probably the last safe time for someone like me to do the kinds of things I did in Africa.

It’s almost too obvious to ask, but there must be a connection between that upbringing and your career choice.

I suppose so. I don’t think I’m the most introspective of people, or maybe I’d like to avoid plumbing too much and then finding some kind of pathology, but—yes. I’ve always wanted to explore, and to me the most exciting thing is to have realized, at a certain age, that, despite the fact that it’s no longer the nineteenth century and I can’t be the first to find some river, that’s not what exploration is really all about. It’s in people’s minds that the unknown lies. More and more, as I think we’ve all learned, past history is never really past. We’re living with all the former centuries now, not just in Africa but everywhere in the world. And that was the exciting thing, that for a long time I’d been thinking I was born in the wrong century, and then I realized that it wasn’t about this jungle or that river; it was about unresolved history and how history continues to inform the present. I think that realization, in a place like Liberia, helps us deal with it, and helps us know how to help Liberians find peace, because what you have there is unreconciled history and faiths and perceptions of reality. I continue to look at Liberia as a place that’s still only barely understood, which makes it a very compelling place, because its problems, its unknown corners, lie in the human soul, as much as they do in a given situation anywhere in that country. And that’s the kind of thing we can find everywhere. ♦

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